Cynthia Graber
speaker
308 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 9 Jun
Cynthia Graber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Because there really weren't a lot of lobsters available.
Available at the time.
So lobster wasn't necessarily on the Native American menu, but Trevor says that cod was.
Trevor says it's likely that lobsters were starting to become a bit more plentiful by the time Europeans showed up, but cod were still the biggest lobster predators, and they shaped more than just the lobster population numbers.
Lobsters can get really kind of terrifyingly big.
Kid.
A lobster the size of a five year old kid or a pretty big dog?
That is genuinely terrifying.
So apart from being terrified by their size, what did Europeans make of these hard shelled beasts?
Did they immediately think, ooh, that's twenty pounds of claw meat, dinner sorted?
Turns out the American lobster is not the only lobster.
Trevor says there are about fifty different species of lobster and they're found all over the world.
But the Europeans were hungry, so they did occasionally deign to eat lobsters.
In fact, there's a persistent urban myth that serving lobster to prison inmates more than once a week was forbidden by law because it was considered such cruel and unusual punishment.
There's no historical evidence for that that we can find, but it does point to the fact that lobster really wasn't considered high class food.
Before lobster could become fancy, there had to be enough of it available to convince New Englanders that it was worthwhile to give these creatures a second chance.
That happened when Europeans fished so many deadly cod that the lobster population started to really flourish.
The big reason cod were king is 'cause you could salt them and preserve them and ship them all over.
Cod had legs, so to speak.
But lobsters had no legs, so to speak.
Showing 81–100 of 308 · page 5 of 16
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